Apparently it has something to do with the 18th century, according to this article. Do you guys think that it has anything to do with those player models spotted on the monitors in the background in one of Naughty Dog's development series videos of The Last of Us?

"the Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched."

"A circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed"

Interesting...

EDIT: Here's a massive (and likely wrong) circumstantial leap... The Panopticon was a type of building designed in the late 18th century...There's been speculation that the recent character models seen in the background of an interview with Naughty Dog showed 18th Century costume...

This is the most common association of the word Panopticon. It really relates to the idea of surveillance in prison systems- by not being sure if they were being watched or not, prisoners took no risks and were forced to monitor their own behaviour and comportment. Michel Foucault discusses it in Discipline and Punish to address how the justice insitutions became diffuse and ubiquitous and not based on violent, public spectacle for punishment. You can understand a lot of things in this day and age as panoptical- facebook for instance- we manage this "profile" of ourselves- this surface image that conveys a version of ourselves to observers, and which we can never be sure as to whether its being looked at by others, just as others can never be sure if we're looking at theirs. The point is that society figuratively becomes multiple panopticons that condition one another based on surface appearances, and that one is effectively constantly being monitored in some way.

Likely the game is set in some kind of surveillance state judging by the rather dark-looking countdown.

Interesting post you wrote. Considering how often news now relies on smartphone video clips, how major cities have ridiculous numbers of surveillance cameras, how Governments are trying (succeeding) to erode peoples right to privacy, it's certainly true that we are all being monitored somehow in some way already.

There's a cool game in there somewhere... Isn't it called Watch Dogs! :)

Also brought up memories of that PS3 game that never launched. Eyedentify if I remember correctly. Used the PlayStation camera. Looked pretty cool back then.

It's smart marketing, they are announcing announcements for next week now and kill a lot of microsoft hype with it. Next week is gonna be even more interesting. After that, I guess Sony'll just relax until E3 because after the Xbox has been announced it will be hard to surpass the Hype for it. And at E3, the real bombs will be dropped.

Naughty dog are clearly working on a launch title plus TLOU port for ps4 PLUS there is more coming up at E3 we haven't even heard about. I have both systems and I'm not into flame wars but MS clearly has their work cut out for them.